Friday, December 24, 2004

A most magical and delightful book

Just finished Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill. I can't believe I didn't read it sooner! Somebody must have told me about it long ago but I never read it till now. And it is EXCELLENT. It gives me vague and positive feelings about the kind of novel I would really like to write in time (unfortunately I am a slow learner when it comes to fiction, it is taking me a million years to get to be a good writer). It reminds me of Jonathan Carroll (only with a vision of the world that's much closer to mine, partly because it's so much less involved with a romantic story of a man and a woman coming together) and Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman and various others I really like who write on the edge of fantasy and realism, books that are as satisfying in terms of character and setting and style as any other kind of novel but have that intangible thing that delights you from when you first read the Chronicles of Narnia or its equivalent.

And I've got a reasonable draft of my MLA paper. And I've done all laundry and picked up dry-cleaning and gotten Xmas presents and generally prepared for a more-sociable-than-usual stint in Philadelphia with family and then MLA-related things. So things look a bit rosier than they did earlier in the week... My only wish for tomorrow is that Penn Station (terrorist/fire hazard par excellence) not be thronged tomorrow morning as it was on Thanksgiving!

About Me

I have published four novels and two books about eighteenth-century British literature; my latest book is "Reading Style: A Life in Sentences." I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.